Month: September 2017

Silicon-based solar cells might soon have had their day in the sun, as researchers find a way to make an emerging alternative stronger for less cost without compromising on efficiency. Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have shown promise in recent years as the future of solar power technology, only there’s been a catch – to make

This Northern Hemisphere summer, researchers spent two months collecting samples from a submerged landmass known as Zealandia. As a result, we could gain new insight into everything from ancient life forms to climate change. Tens of millions of years ago, a landmass that’s being referred to as Zealandia was largely submerged beneath the Pacific

Don’t go in the water. That’s been the warning from public health experts for weeks in the wake of hurricanes Irma and Harvey, which left Texas and Florida strewn with millions of gallons of sewage and virtually covered in bacteria. Now, their words of warning perhaps ring more strongly: Earlier this week, a woman

If you haven’t heard, rapper B.o.B thinks the Earth is flat. We know this, because he tweets about it constantly, and is currently crowdfunding to try and get a satellite out to space to “help B.o.B find the curve!” No, we’re really not making this up. Actually that’s a great idea. 💯💯💯 https://t.co/1obtdBZocH —

SpaceX founder Elon Musk presented his vision for getting people to Mars within five years at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide today. The spaceship, dubbed the BFR, would carry around 100 people into outer space, but at the end of his presentation he floated the idea of using it to fly anywhere around the

Elon Musk plans to start colonise Mars within five years. Musk tweeted on Monday that he would reveal “major improvements” to his plan at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, most likely in the shape of changes to a two-part, 40-storey-tall vehicle called the Interplanetary Transport System which is expected to take the first

Icy materials in space could behave like liquids at low temperatures and under ultraviolet light, suggests new research, and that might help to explain how planets began to form in the earliest days of the Solar System. The gas and icy giants circling round our Sun are thought to have been created from water-dominated ice,

New research shows that nearly 300 species of coastal creatures were carried across the Pacific Ocean in the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, with some organisms making a journey of more than 7,000 kilometres (4,350 miles) across the waves from Japan to the United States. This unprecedented migration was made possible by the

Among the possible pest infestations you could get, bed bugs are definitely one of the worst. They’ll nest inside your mattress and feast on your flesh at night, and they develop resistance to pesticides really quickly. So once you have them, getting them gone is really tricky and requires professional help. And there has

Questions of whether our reality is a simulation of something deeper have kept philosophers and freshmen awake since Plato was a pup. A pair of physicists sleep a lot easier at night now that they’ve shown that quantum weirdness involving twists in space-time can’t conceivably be simulated, adding to a list of problems that The

We use lithium-ion batteries every day – those rechargeable wonders in our smartphones, laptops, and even a pacemaker if you have one. Having a facility that creates lithium-ion batteries is however incredibly complicated, but now Australia has joined the ranks of countries with a facility capable of producing them. Researchers from the Queensland University

An amateur metal detectorist has hit the motherlode: a cache of bronze treasures in Gloucestershire, dating back to the last decades of the Ancient Roman occupation of Britain. The find, which is being hailed as the first such in British history, mostly consists of broken pieces, but one is intact – a bronze statue of

ESA scientists have found one additional image from the Rosetta spacecraft hiding in the telemetry. This new image was found in the last bits of data sent by Rosetta immediately before it shut down on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko last year. The new image shows a close-up shot of the rocky, pebbly surface

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX, is about to present an updated plan for colonising Mars with 1 million people. The International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, is hosting Musk’s presentation on Friday. SpaceX will stream video of the event via a YouTube Live feed, which we’ve embedded at the end of this post.

The ground under your feet was not always so firm. Earth is thought to have gradually coalesced in fiery collisions of smaller planetoids – and those hellish conditions can now explain an enduring scientific mystery. Though scientists have long held to this view of planetary accretion, it’s never been clear why the chemical makeup of

Mark Anthony in Shakespeare’s Cleopatra may have referred to “the tears that live in the onion”. But why do onions actually make us cry? And why do only some onions make us blub in this way when others, including related ‘allium’ plants such as garlic, barely ever draw a tear when chopped? When any

Australia was once home to a giant prehistoric Ice Age marsupial related to wombats and koalas, and that followed an annual seasonal migration. The three-tonne beast, up to 1.8 metres (6 ft) tall and 3.5 metres (11.5 ft) long, was the only known marsupial to follow a migration pattern, according to our research published in

Red makes the heart beat faster. You will frequently find this and other claims made for the effects of different colours on the human mind and body. But is there any scientific evidence and data to support such claims? The physiological mechanisms that underpin human colour vision have been understood for the best part of a

It is increasingly seeming like only a matter of time before humans get to Mars. One of the big questions is – once we get there, how are we going to live? The United Arab Emirates is seeking an answer to this question by building an entire city to simulate Mars conditions, as realistically as

The human brain is used as a comparison for how computer’s function. But, honestly, computers are nothing like human brains. Not yet, at least. That could change as researchers have developed computing technology that uses light to mimic the functionality of a nerve’s synapse, opening the way for hardware that combines the speed of modern

In Spring of 2017, NASA revealed their plans for what the massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket would be used for: to build the Deep Space Gateway, a space station in cis-lunar orbit that’ll serve as a stepping stone to the exploration of the Solar System. Until today, it was assumed that this would be a

In the isolated Solomon Islands, mothers and fathers have been known to sing to their children of apocryphal rats. In one rhyme, Kamare and Isuku go scurrying up a child, one rat on each side. They climb the ribs and reach the armpits, where the singer finally tickles the child. Isuku, as the song

A massive international team made history in 2016 when they announced that, for the first time ever, they’d confirmed the existence of gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of spacetime from the collision of two black holes. Now gravitational wave astronomy has taken a leap forward with the detection of of a collision between

President Franklin Roosevelt’s aviation chief had a New Deal plan to get everyday Americans up in the air. But he needed help. So Eugene Vidal sparked a competition among the nation’s tinkerers, engineers and aircraft makers. His challenge: build a “rugged, safe and simple” aircraft that would be as easy to drive as a car

Today’s working quantum computers are already more powerful than their traditional computing counterparts, but a pair of researchers from the University of Tokyo think they’ve found a way to make these remarkable machines even more powerful. In a research paper published in Physical Review Letters, Akira Furusawa and Shuntaro Takeda detail their novel approach to

Time to add even more candles to life’s birthday cake – around another 150 million of them, to be precise. Rocks from northern Canada have shown signs that life was doing its thing about 3.95 billion years ago, setting a new record for fossils while showing biology was more eager to get started on Earth

Update 27/09/17: It’s happening! We have confirmation that the LIGO team will go ahead with the rumoured announcement today at 6:30pm Italian time (that’s 12:30pm EST). We’ll be doing a live blog when that happens so stay tuned for a link to that right here! Time to keep a close eye on the LIGO announcement

It’s not every day scientists say a new kind of renewable energy could satisfy the majority of our power needs, so when they do, it’s worth leaning in close. In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers have found that energy harvested from the evaporation of water in US lakes and reservoirs could power nearly 70 percent of

A 4,000-year-old tomb in Jerusalem has yielded up a lovely surprise – a funerary vessel containing the tiny bones of at least nine toads, all of which had been decapitated prior to being placed inside. The tomb was one of 67 human-made shaft tombs found in the Nahal Repha’im basin, not far from the Jerusalem

Over the course of an 8-hour workday, the average employee works for about 3 hours – 2 hours and 53 minutes, to be more precise. The rest of the time, according to a 2016 survey of 1,989 UK office workers, people spend on a combination of reading the news, browsing social media, eating food, socialising

Rapper B.o.B has been pretty outspoken on Twitter in his belief that Earth is flat – so much so that he even got into a Twitter/rap battle with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson about it last year. But he’s now taking things to the next level, setting up a GoFundMe page asking people to donate money

NASA spacecraft OSIRIS-REx is well on its way to asteroid Bennu. It launched just over a year ago, on 8 September 2016, but it just needed a little extra push from Earth’s gravity to get it the rest of the way there. That flyby took place on 22 September, and the OSIRIS-REx team took the

There’s more than one way to build a supercomputer, and researchers have come up with a new method for crunching data on a massive scale: using a type of ‘magic dust’ made from quantum particles called polaritons. These polaritons are half light and half matter, and scientists have been able to demonstrate how they can

The grim predictions of climate change envisage a sweltering future where rising seas swallow the land – but in Earth’s ancient past, receding waters may have triggered a different kind of hell. A monumental drying out that took place more than 5 million years ago caused the Mediterranean Sea to literally evaporate – and scientists

An archaeological excavation in Trondheim, Norway has revealed a hidden surprise – the unmistakeable traces of a boat buried under Torvet, the city’s market square. The discovery came just in the nick of time, in the final available moments before archaeologists planned to end their excavation so the market square could be filled in and

Around the world, efforts are ramping up to try and uncover the mystery of fast radio bursts – extremely powerful, milliseconds-long radio bursts from somewhere out beyond the solar system. We don’t know what they are. We don’t even know where most of them are coming from, since the majority of sources only emit a

An ancient city thought to have been founded in the era of Alexander the Great has been discovered after being lost in the sands of history for over 2,000 years. Qalatga Darband, which overlooks a river in the Sulaimaniya province of Iraqi Kurdistan, bears the traces of an ancient fortified settlement, and now archaeologists have

It’s a panoramic, mind-blowing view of a molecular cloud complex littered with stardust, wisps of matter and general turmoil – a glimpse of a Milky Way region where new stars are being born. It’s magical. The European Space Agency (ESA) has been celebrating the legacy of its wonderful Herschel Space Observatory, and we can’t

It’s hard to say exactly why you like someone. Maybe it’s their goofy smile; maybe it’s their razor-sharp wit; or maybe it’s simply that they’re easy to be around. You just like them. But scientists generally aren’t satisfied with answers like that, and they’ve spent years trying to pinpoint the exact factors that draw

Primates such as apes, monkeys and chimpanzees can appear extraordinarily human in their responses to the world around them. They have been observed, for instance, grieving when members of their tribe die, in a surprisingly touching way. Mother primates are also known to carry around their dead babies for some time after death, although it

Five minutes in the life of a guppy in the terrible spring of 2015: You’re swimming around with your friends in a tank. You’ve been here for days. Food falls from the sky. Everything is fine. Then suddenly, you’re netted up and dropped into an alien world, all alone, just you and the glass.

An enormous Antarctic glacier has given up an iceberg over 100 square miles (259 sq km) in size, the second time in two years it has lost such a large piece in a process that has scientists wondering if its behaviour is changing for the worse. The Pine Island Glacier is one of the largest

As humans have ventured further from our home planet, we have sought other living organisms, proof that we’re not alone. We, of course, haven’t found any yet. But a growing amount of data has given us a better sense of where in the solar system we should look more carefully. Seth Shostak, a senior

Aluminium is already highly prized. It’s conductive, has a low melting point, is very strong when alloyed, is impervious to rust and, above all, it’s extremely light. But what if you could get it lighter – so light, in fact, that it could float on water even when not made into the shape of a

We’ve all heard the terrible stories about the Great Barrier Reef, and the extensive bleaching that has occurred in recent years. But despite what some news outlets might think, the reef is not actually dead, and we still need to monitor what’s happening closely to try to stop the damage where possible. That’s why

Ever since the EM drive first made headlines, science lovers have puzzled over how the propulsion system seems to produce thrust, despite the fact it’s ‘impossible’ according to one of the most fundamental laws of physics – Newton’s third law of motion. Now a team of physicists have put forward an alternative explanation – it

When Dutch sailors became the first Europeans to lay eyes on Easter Island in 1722, they found two sets of figures staring back at them. One gaze belonged to the remote island’s Polynesian inhabitants – the Rapa Nui – but this human society was rivalled by a staggering population of almost 900 monolithic statues, and

The Australian Federal Government announced it will finally commit to a national space agency at the International Astronomical Congress in Adelaide, South Australia on Monday. The move has come after mounting pressure from experts, who have been growing increasingly concerned that Australia was missing the boat taking a share in the AU$420 billion (US$330 billion)